Social Shopping Application Company Raises Seed Capital

Social shopping marketers and iPhone application makers are two very popular types companies attracting investor capital. Put the two together and you have Zappli, which produces the iPhone application called myShopanion. The company just raised $500,000 of seed money from angel investors.

Zappli intends to use the capital infusion to take a leading role in the social shopping bandwagon by hiring e-commerce experts. The investors in Zappli are likely to provide a channel to the desired talent pool. They include the former COO of eBay and former director of marketing at PayPal.

The company began in 2010 and obtained the seed capital soon after demonstrating myShopanion. The application permits users to scan product barcodes in order to read reviews and ask for feedback from friends on Facebook or Twitter.

At around the same time as Zappli was getting started, several variations of social shopping applications were emerging. They permit shoppers to obtain multiple types of product information in several ways.

But myShopanion is the first application to use social networks to check up on products. It also permits shoppers to discover new products by seeing what friends are scanning and asking about. Users of myShopanion are not limited to scanning a barcode. They can also simply take a picture or type the product name. Zappli is adding new features that improve the capabilities of myShopanion to locate friends on social networks.

Zappli is another testament to the validity of launching a new corporation before the product is perfected and all the capital is available. Both product improvements and investor capital usually fall into place only after entrepreneurs fully commit to their new corporations.